Dr. Anna Herland is a Wallenberg Academy Fellow Assistant Professor at the Department of Micro and Nanosystems, Royal Institute of Technology and Department of Physiology and Pharmacology, Karolinska Institute. She leads the group “In vitro neural systems” focussing on microphysiological systems, combining micro engineering and stem cell engineering. Before this, Dr. Herland was a Visiting Research Fellow in Professor Donald Ingber’s group at Harvard Medical School and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering of Harvard University and a Marie Curie Fellow and senior researcher at Karolinska Institute. This was preceded by a postdoc in stem cell engineering at Karolinska Institute with Professor Ana Teixeira. Dr. Herland has a Ph.D. in Biomolecular and Organic Electronics and M.Sc. degree in Engineering Biology from the Linköping University, Sweden.

The neurovascular unit (NVU) is a restrictive barrier essential for function and health of the central nervous system (CNS). The NVU lines the 400 miles of capillaries that course through the brain and spinal cord and is formed by a complex network of endothelial cells, astrocytes, pericytes, neurons and a basal lamina. Despite being of major importance for evaluating brain targeting of drugs and disease-induced alternations the established in vitro models of the NVU are disappointingly non-predictive. Animal in vivo models typically also fail to severe as models of the human NVU and CNS due to species-specific differences. We used micro-engineering to create vascular-mimicking, fluidic Organ-on-Chip models of NVU. These models were populated with human primary or stem cell derived vascular and neural cells. The design of the NVU-on-Chip was tailored after the on the biological study in focus. A 3D microfluidic NVU model was created to allow direct interaction between the human endothelium and perivascular cells such as astrocytes or pericytes. This configuration resulted in higher barrier function and a more in vivo like response to an acute inflammation compared to a traditional culture. For evaluation of drug efflux properties and penetration of biopharmaceuticals, we developed a compartmentalized NVU-on-Chip system. This system also facilitated studies of drug-induced blood-brain-barrier alternations.